Josep Corbi raises several worries about the
metaethical position that Mark Timmons and I have articulated and defended, which
we call “nondescriptivist cognitivism.”… His remarks prompt some points of
clarification….

Timmons and
I characterize descriptive content as
“way-the-world-might-be” content. We maintain that “base case” beliefs—roughly,
those non-evaluative and evaluative beliefs whose contents have the simplest
kinds of logical form—are of two types: a non-evaluative belief is an is-commitment with respect to a core
descriptive content, and an evaluative belief is an ought-commitment with respect to a core descriptive content. Core
descriptive contents are those descriptive contents expressible by
(nonevaluative) atomic sentences. Concerning the notion of a core descriptive
content, Corbi says:

Core
descriptive contents are not, despite appearances to the contrary, descriptive.
For descriptive contents have essentially to do with a representation of “the
world as being a certain way” and
thereby they already have a certain direction of fit; while core descriptive
contents are merely concerned with “a way-the-world-might-be content” because they are meant to be neutral with regard
to the direction of fit. (p. 220)

But when we
said that a descriptive content is a “way-the-world-might-be” content, the point of the modal word ‘might’ was merely
to acknowledge that the world might not in fact be the way the given
descriptive content says. This is a “non-success” use of the word
‘descriptive’. Under this usage, for example, the statement “Al Gore is U.S
President in 2002” has descriptive content, even though it is not true—and hence
does not describe how things actually
are. Descriptive content certainly has objective truth conditions.

Corbi questions our remark that in
the case of base-case is-commitment states but not in the case of base-case
ought-commitment states, the belief’s declarative content “coincides with its
core descriptive content.” But we think our remark should be noncontroversial
when understood as we intended it. Consider these two belief-attributions:

(a)Carme believes that she is studying
hard.

(b)Carme believes that she ought to be
studying hardl.

The logical
form of (b), as we construe it, is made more perspicuous this way:

(b*)Carme believes that it ought to be that
she is studying hard.

Both of the
beliefs attributed by these statements have the same core content, viz., the
content expressed by the ‘that’-clause ‘that Carme is studying hard’. Statement
(a) reveals what we meant by saying that in the case of a base-case descriptive
belief, the belief’s declarative content coincides with its core descriptive
content; the point is that both contents are expressed by the statement’s
‘that’-clause. Likewise, statement (b*) reveals what we mean by saying that in
the case of a base-case evaluative belief, the belief’s declarative content
does not coincide with its core
descriptive content; here the point is that the belief’s declarative content is
expressed by the ‘that’-clause appended to the word ‘believes’, whereas the
belief’s core descriptive content is expressed by the distinct ‘that’-clause
appended to the words ‘it ought to be’

Although Timmons and I are
nondescriptivists about moral beliefs, we contend that descriptivists have
reason to embrace our overall framework for belief. A descriptivist seeking to
accommodate metaethical internalism could maintain, for example, that the
belief expressed by statement (b*) is both an ought-commitment with respect to
the core content that Carme is studying
hard, and an is-commitment with respect to the putatively descriptive
declarative content that it ought to be
that Carme is studying hard. But Corbi objects that our framework rules out
this kind of descriptivism, by virtue of a statement of ours that he quotes,
viz., “Evaluative beliefs differ essentially from descriptive beliefs in the
following respect: the core descriptive content of an evaluative belief does
not coincide with its core declarative content.” Corbi takes us to be
presupposing here that metaethical descriptivism is false. But the quoted
statement was meant to be neutral about metaethical descriptivism; it can be
rephrased by replacing the word ‘descriptive’ by the word ‘non-evaluative’,
prior to the second occurrence of ‘beliefs’. (In the quoted sentence, we
briefly adopted a common alternative use of ‘descriptive’ that unfortunately
can cause confusion in the context of discussions of descriptivism vs.
nondescriptivism—a use in which ‘descriptive’ essentially just means
‘non-evaluative’.)

Corbi takes us to hold that a
benchmark difference between descriptive and non-descriptive content is that in
the case of the former, rational agents can achieve convergence—an idea that
Crispin Wright (1992) calls the “cognitive command” constraint. But this is not
our view. Rather, for us the key distinguishing feature of descriptive content
(as opposed to nondescriptive content) is this: for the former (but not the
latter), the operative semantic standards are what we call tight. By this we mean that the semantic standards, together with
how things are with respect to the PROPERTIESand RELATIONS instantiated by OBJECTS, jointly conspire to determinately
fix correct-affirmability and correct-deniability status (i.e., truth or
falsity) for a given declarative content.[1]
We actually agree with Corbi that in general, a requirement of rational
convergence cannot even be satisfied by those discourses that are
paradigmatically presented as descriptive….

Stephen
Barker maintains that nondescriptivist cognitivism, as Timmons and I
articulate it, is incoherent because it conflates two senses of ‘content’
which, when clearly articulated, reveal inconsistencies in our position. He
misconstues our position, but in an instructive way.

We reject the Semantic Assumption,
which asserts that all genuinely cognitive content is descriptive content
(i.e., way-the-world-might-be content). Consider the sentences that Barker
labels (1)-(4):

(1)Bertie will mail the parcel.

(2)Bertie ought to mail the parcel.

(3)Jane believes that Bertie will mail the
parcel.

(4)Jane believes that Bertie ought to mail
the parcel.

We claim
that the overall declarative content of (2), and of the belief attributed by
(4), is not descriptive. So we also reject the assumption that Barker calls Orthodoxy, which asserts that a belief
state is always a relation between a believer (speaker) and a proposition (or sentence,
or whatever) such that what is believed is something having overall descriptive
content.

Barker, focusing on our rejection of
Orthodoxy, takes us to be embracing
a thesis he calls Content Identity,
which asserts two things: first, that the overall declarative content of
sentence (1) and of the belief attributed by sentence (3) is an is-commitment
with respect to the core content {Bertie mails the parcel}; and second, that
the overall declarative content of sentence (2) and of the belief attributed by
sentence (4) is an ought-commitment with respect to this same core content.
Here is a key passage from Barker, revealing his rationale for this reading us
this way:

H/T claim
that they are overthrowing the orthodox conception of belief: Orthodoxy. To explain the belief
attributions (3) and (4)...H/T cannot merely affirm that there are different
kinds of belief states, which can take the same
kinds of objects, they need rather to show that there are belief states
that take different kinds of objects.
So H/T must explain what these two sorts of belief-objects are meant to be and
to provide evidence that there are two such types of object. H/T purport to be
explaining what they mean by different kinds of belief-objects through their
content identity claims, Content
Identity.... This seems to be the assurance H/T supply themselves with that
objects of belief can come in two forms, one form somehow representational and
the other somehow nonrepresentational. And this they take to furnish themselves
with the means of denying Orthodoxy.
But Content Identity is an instance
of flagrant content/state conflation. Declarative contents are meant to be contents. But now they are being equated
with states. (pp. 243f.)

I have several things to say about
this construal of our position, and about the rationale motivating the
interpretation. First, it is certainly a mistaken
interpretation. Timmons and I never explicitly equated declarative contents
with is-commitment states or ought-commitement states, and we never intended to
do so. We entirely agree with Barker that this would be a flagrant conflation
between what he calls “content qua semantic object of a contentful
psychological state,” and “content qua the state itself that possesses such
content” (p. 241). We also agree that adopting Content Identity would make the resulting position untenable, and
perhaps outright incoherent. One reason (among others) why we should reject Content Identity, as Barker rightly
points out, is that we ourselves say that ought-commitments are suspended in the case of logically
complex beliefs with embedded normative contents, which strongly suggests that
ought-commitments “are features of force and should not then be equated with
declarative content” (p. 246).

But second, the underlying philosophical
demand that motivates Barker’s interpretation is an important and legitimate
one (even though it causes him to misconstrue our position). In order for the
H/T framework to be viable, it needs to be incorporatable within a more
complete theoretical treatment of belief-states that credibly explains their ontological structure. This will have to
be a theoretical treatment that repudiates Orthodoxy
and offers some alternative positive account of the ontological structure of at
least some belief-states—viz.,
beliefs whose overall declarative content is not descriptive.

Third, I acknowledge that no such
positive account of the ontological structure of belief-states was provided, in
Horgan and Timmons (2000). To that extent, the framework for belief we described
was incomplete in an important respect. And I acknowledge that unless a
credible positive account of the requisite kind can be given, our framework
will not be tenable.

Fourth, I do think that the
requisite treatment of the ontology of belief-states can be provided. One
approach, for instance, would be to adapt the proposal in Fodor (1968) that the
objects of the propositional attitudes are sentences in the “language of
thought”; the class of eligible mentalese sentences could then include ones with
non-descriptive content. (I do not much like Fodor’s proposal, however; cf.
Horgan 1992). I myself am inclined instead to favor an approach to the
ontological structure of belief-states, and to the logical form of
belief-attributions, proposed by Quine in Word
and Object. After canvassing various alternative construals of
belief-objects, Quine wrote:

A final
alternative that I find as appealing as any is simply to dispense with the
objects of the propositional attitudes. We can...formulate the propositional
attitudes with the help of the notations of intensional abstraction...but just
cease to view these notations as singular terms referring to objects. This
means viewing ‘Tom believes [Cicero denounced
Catiline]’ no longer of the form ‘Fab’ with a
= Tom and b = [Cicero denounced
Catiline], but rather of the form ‘Fa’ with a
= Tom and complex ‘F’. The verb ‘believes’ here ceases to be a term and becomes
part of an operator ‘believes that’, or ‘believes []’, which applied to a sentence, produces a
composite absolute general term whereof the sentence is counted an immediate
constituent. (Quine 1960, p. 216)

He also
proposed generalizing this treatment to cover “de re” belief-constructions. He
later called the envisioned propositional attitude operators “attitudinatives”
(Quine 1970, pp. 32-33). In Horgan (1989) I elaborated and defended Quine’s
proposal, with particular attention to explaining how the meaning of a Quineian
attitudinative construction is dependent upon the meanings of its components.

Barker observes that Timmons and I
adopt a “dispositionalist” treatment of beliefs whose overall declarative
content is logically complex. As we said in our paper:

The
essential feature of any given logically complex commitment-type is its
distinctive constitutive inferential role
in an agent’s cognitive economy (insofar as the agent is rational), a role
involving the relevant core descriptive contents.... So, for example, consider
the belief that either Jeeves mailed the
parcel or Bertie ought to mail the parcel.... The embedded moral
constituent, Bertie ought to mail the
parcel, is in the offing in the sense that the complex commitment-state in
question, together with the belief that Jeeves did not mail the parcel,
inferentially yields (at least for the minimally rational agent) an
ought-commitment with respect to Bertie’s mailing the parcel. (Horgan and
Timmons 2000, pp. 136-7).

Barker
raises a legitimate concern about how such an inferentialist approach is
supposed to handle beliefs like the belief that George ought not to be
President. This prompts a revision in our position. Timmons and I now would
propose a non-inferentialist construal of minimimally complex negative
beliefs—that is, beliefs of the logical type ~F and the logical type Ought(~F), where F is a core descriptive
content (and hence is expressible as an atomic sentence). Briefly, the idea is
that such negative beliefs, like their affirmative counterparts, should be
construed as commitment states with a direct
constitutive psychological role in cognitive economy (rather than a
constitutive inferential role). There
are two direct, noninferential, kinds of is-commitment with respect to a core
descriptive content and likewise two direct kinds of
ought-commitment—affirmative and negative.[2]
With this improvement incorporated into our position, I think the treatment of
embedding in section VII.2 of our paper otherwise goes through as before,
mutatis mutandis.

[1] Here I
adapt Putnam’s capitalization convention, to indicate that I mean to be talking
about denizens of the mind-independent, discourse-independent, world. I often
use this convention in articulating my favored approach to truth. See, for
instance, Horgan (2001). [Note added 1/16/03.]

[2] Of
course, all four kinds of belief can combine with other beliefs to generate new beliefs (for a rational agent). In
this sense, even these four minimally complex kinds of belief have a
constitutive inferential aspect. But the point is that this aspect does not
exhaust their constitutive role in psychological economy.